Twisting My Melon

by Shaun Ryder

  Within a few days of being in LA, we got to know the kids out there, mostly Mancs and Scousers, who were running all the early raves there and dealing the E. There were a lot of them out in LA then; there still are. Back then some of them were grafters, but some of them were just hairdressers or something, who sold a few pills and put on raves on the side. We even got to the stage with these kids where they would ask us who they should let in on the door and who they shouldn’t. One night Chris Quinten turned up trying to get in and I was like, ‘Well, he isn’t coming in for a start, because he dissed us.’ Then he was running round asking everyone, ‘Why don’t them lot like me?’ Why don’t we like you? Well, we tried to be nice and say ‘All right?’ to you, and you blanked us. Now you want to come to all these raves? Do one.

  What made me laugh, as well, was when the Yank kids would come up chatting to us, and they didn’t have a fucking clue. They’d be going, ‘Hey man, I believe you all even starting raving over in England now, huh?’ I just thought, ‘You bunch of dicks, we’ve been at it for years. All these raves you go to, which you think is your scene, are organized by Mancs and Scousers.’ They didn’t have a clue.

  Bez got introduced to Julia Roberts one of the first nights we were there, but he didn’t really know who she was. I remember him coming over to me and saying, ‘X, do you know who Julie Rouberts is? That’s her over there and she’s got a bodyguard called Evil.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you know who she is.’ Bez said, ‘No, I don’t.’ I said, ‘You know that film that we watched on the plane on the way coming over, Pretty Woman? That’s Julia Roberts.’ Bez was like, ‘Oh, yeah. I think she fancies me.’ I think she did. She ended up going out to her car to get her driving licence to prove to Bez that she was Julia Roberts. Nothing happened between them, though. I think Bez got on better with her bodyguard, Evil.

  We used to hang out all over. Venice Beach was still quite heavy back then; it didn’t start getting cleaned up until the mid-90s. We went to Johnny Depp’s club, the Viper Room, where River Phoenix later died. Oakey also had a residency at a club on Friday nights and we used to go down there a bit. I’ve hung out all over LA. When I was back there later, with Black Grape, I used to go to Billy Idol’s wife’s place, which was up where Danny Saber, who became part of Black Grape, lives.

  While we were recording Pills ’n’ Thrills there was this lad hanging round the studio for a few days, a Scouser, who just seemed dead normal and pretty cool, and we didn’t clock who he was. It was only after a few days that we realized it was Ian Astbury from the Cult. Obviously we were aware of the Cult, but we thought they were slightly glamorous LA-style rockers. We didn’t know that Ian was actually a Scouser. You couldn’t really tell, because he looked the part and fitted so well into that LA scene. I really liked him. I haven’t seen him much since, but back then he seemed quite cool.

  I’ve never been tempted to move to LA full time. Over the years I’ve done stints when I’ve had to be there for months and months at a time, usually for recording purposes, and I’m always quite glad to get out of there. Particularly because of the game that I’m in, which is full of bullshit. We spent quite a bit of time out there with Black Grape, because we had American management and were signed to an American label. We did some music for films, because Gary Kurfirst, who signed Black Grape, was quite plugged into that world, and we got taken round the film sets and introduced to everyone. That world is so fake and transparent. It’s like, ‘Hey, here comes Tom! Hey Tommy! You gotta meet Tom, he’s such a great guy!!’ Then you might be in a restaurant five days later and Tommy walks in, but all of a sudden he’s not hot any more and everyone’s whispering, ‘Hey, Tommy just walked in. Don’t look at him,’ as if he suddenly smells of shit. From hero to zero. Six days later he’s hot again, and everyone’s like, ‘Hey, Tommy! Great to see you man. Looking good!’ It used to do my fucking nut in.

  Even though we were in Los Angeles in the sun, and we were still quite young, all in our mid- to late twenties, we were actually quite hard-working on Pills ’n’ Thrills. Of course we were going out partying as well, but we did really knuckle down in the studio – as we did for Bummed with Hannett, even though we were totally off our heads on the E, and as we’d done with Squirrel and John Cale. When it came down to work time, we were still really focused on the job in hand when we were in the studio.

  I think we had six tracks already written and demoed when we arrived in Los Angeles, stuff that we’d written back in Manchester, and the other tracks – songs like ‘Loose Fit’ – started from beats that Oakey and Osborne had, which we then worked up into full songs. Those beats from Oakey and Osborne played a massive part in shaping the sound of Pills ’n’ Thrills. I knew from ‘Jibaro’ the sound that I wanted to get from us working with them, to marry that Balearic beat with the Mondays sound, and they gave it to me. I generally only need a bass line and/or drums to start getting ideas to write with, so working with those beats was perfect to me. It was a really pleasurable experience making Pills ’n’ Thrills, from start to finish. It just worked so well, and I was really confident in what we were producing.

  The opening track, ‘Kinky Afro’, was one of the songs we had already written back in Manchester, and along with ‘Step On’ it kind of set the tone for the album. I wouldn’t necessarily call it dance music; I just saw it as a new form of pop music. The opening lyric of ‘Kinky Afro’ is probably one of my most quoted lyrics – ‘Son, I’m 30, I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty’ – although I was actually only twenty-eight when I wrote that. But ‘Son, I’m 28, I only went with your mother cos she’s, er, my mate’ wouldn’t really have worked. ‘Kinky Afro’, again, is just a story, a wacky comic-strip story which draws from several places. I had the opening lines, and then I had some other words I liked that didn’t really mean much – that’s how it often happens with me. I’ll have two bits of lyrics I like that don’t really relate to each other, and then find some way of linking them and making some sense of it. It’s like putting a jigsaw together.

  Wilson said ‘Kinky Afro’ was the most profound comment on parenthood since Yeats or something, but that’s Wilson for you. Okay, I suppose the start of the second verse – ‘I said Dad, you’re a shabby. You run around and act like a baddy. You’re only here just out of habit. All that’s mine you might as well have it’ – could be seen as a bit of a dig at my old man, but only in a jokey way. My old fella never said anything to me about it, and it wasn’t really about him.

  The chorus obviously rips elements of ‘Lady Marmalade’ with the ‘Yippee-ippie-ey-ey-ay-yey-yey’ bit; I think everyone can hear that. The way I saw it, my approach to ripping records was kind of what became standard in rap music – lifting or adopting the odd line that you liked or that fitted. To me, this was progression from doing cover versions. Bands before the Beatles only ever did cover versions, and even the Beatles and Stones did them when they first set off.

  ‘Kinky Afro’ was chosen as the lead single from the album, and Central Station came up with the idea of ripping an image of Michael Jackson for the cover of the single, but someone thought people might take it the wrong way, and pointed out that the lyric ‘I had to crucify some brother today’ might be taken the wrong way in the States.

  Everything to do with the artwork was always down to Our Matt, Pat and Karen at Central Station. They would put about ten ideas in front of us, for the album cover, single cover, posters and whatever else we needed. Then we would say, ‘Okay, that can be used for this, that for this single, and we’ll use that for a poster, and that we don’t like.’ I, personally, would never have used any sort of image of Michael Jackson on a cover, because I just wasn’t into that, but Our Matt and Pat really liked it. When you ripped stuff for artwork some people in the industry would get nervous. Particularly after the rise of hip hop, when artists started getting done for sampling music, people in the industry would get nervous about ripping anything – bits of music, lyrics, artwork or anything. So that might have been an a
rgument against using the image of Jacko, but I think it was more to do with the Americans taking it the wrong way. The Yanks could easily take offence at artwork. I’ve already mentioned that one US pressing plant refused to handle Bummed because the inner sleeve was a picture of a naked woman. They also took offence at the artwork for the second Black Grape album, which was a cartoon image of a black grape with boggly eyes. The Yanks looked at it and said, ‘That’s derogatory to black people.’ We had two black kids in the band, Kermit and Psycho, who hadn’t even thought anything of it. But then white people in suits in America turn round and say, ‘Oh, you’ve got a golliwog on the front of the album with wobbly eyes – that’s offensive to black people.’ Eh?! The band is called Black Grape and it’s a black grape, you knobs.

  People always assume that ‘God’s Cop’ is about James Anderton, chief of Greater Manchester Police, or Mancunians do anyway, but it’s more of a nod to him than a whole song about him. It’s one of those songs that have several double meanings in there. The line ‘Me and the chief got Soul II Soul’ could mean me and the chief are into Soul II Soul, or it could mean we relate to each other, we’ve got soul to soul, the same views. It’s a double piss-take. Like I said before, Anderton was infamous for proclaiming that he spoke to God, and that’s what the line ‘God made it easy on me’ is a reference to. But I would also have regular chats with God myself. Well, when I say that, I mean when I was in the middle of a tricky situation, or something had gone off and it was coming on top, I would go, ‘Oh God, what am I doing?’ But that’s not really chatting to God, is it? That’s more a chat with yourself, but you’re bringing God into it without even thinking about it. I’m sure loads of people do that. Does that make you as barmy as Anderton? No. That fucker was actually going round telling people he’s talking to God and believing he was acting on God’s orders. It seems mental now that he was the chief of police, but it somehow seemed to fit in with the madness in Manchester at the time. So, part of Anderton is there in the lyrics to ‘God’s Cop’, and part of me as well.

  ‘Donovan’ was more of a chilled vibe. The opening lines, ‘Six cheap people in an empty hotel, every last one with a story to tell, give them all pills so their heads won’t swell’, is basically a pun on all our lot. It was a little nod to us, staying in a hotel on tour, and then I expanded it into a story, and ripped the line ‘Oh sunshine, shone brightly through my window today, could have tripped out quite easy, but I decided to stay’ from Donovan’s ‘Sunshine Superman’, which is where the title comes from. I’m not sure what Don thought of it, to be honest; I don’t think I ever asked him.

  ‘Grandbag’s Funeral’ is one of those songs where the title actually isn’t much to do with the song. I didn’t know anyone called Grandbag. My grandad, Bill Carroll, had recently died, so obviously that was fresh in my mind, but we didn’t call him Grandbag, and it wasn’t really about his funeral. Sometimes we’ll write a song and a title will come to me that fits, but sometimes it won’t for ages. Then someone will turn round and say, ‘Right, c’mon, we need a title for this now,’ and I’ll just say whatever is on my mind that minute, or whatever is in front of me in the room, it could be ‘Bottle of water’ or something as simple or daft as that.

  There was a nod in the lyrics of ‘Loose Fit’ to the Gulf War, which was happening at the time – ‘gonna buy an airforce base, gonna wipe out your race’ – but that was more because I was seeing images of the war on television all the time, rather than me deliberately making a big political statement. Because of the lyric ‘Don’t need no skin tights in my wardrobe today’ some people think it’s about clothes or the way I dress or something, but it isn’t. I wouldn’t write a song about that. ‘Don’t you know I’ve got better taste’?

  The second side of the album starts with ‘Dennis and Lois’, which is named after a real-life American couple from Brooklyn, New York. Dennis and Lois were (they still are, they’re still around) two very odd characters who liked music and really liked Mancunians for some reason, and they would turn up when we played New York. Dennis was a Vietnam vet and they collected all sorts of crap. We went back to their house once and they had all these toys that they’d collected, which they kept in the original boxes. They came over to Manchester quite a lot as well, and they would put Mancunian musicians up when they played in New York if they didn’t have much dough. They were also massive Frank Sidebottom fans and Chris Sievey, Frank’s creator, would stay with them when he went to the States. The song is not about them; it’s just named after them. But when I named a song after them, they were made up. People would ask who Dennis and Lois were and they became mini celebs. The opening line from that song, ‘We all learn to box at the Midget Club’, is not about us lot. I nicked that from reading about how some London gangsters – I don’t think it was the Krays, it was some other firm – all learned to box, or used to hang out, at some gym called the Midget Club. I didn’t really learn to box as a kid, but friends of mine now, like Billy and Too Nice Tom, who I’ve known for twenty years, are in the game. Tom has been a corner man for years and has tried in the past to mould me into some form of boxer, but it’s a bit late for that now.

  ‘Bob’s Your Uncle’ was another track that came from my obsession with Oakey’s track ‘Jibaro’. I wanted us to do a track like that with Spanish guitar, but in a Mondays style, and I just stuck all these dirty lines about your mother sucking cocks in hell, and Exorcist-type lyrics over it, and made it into some sort of story, and then Oakey got Rowetta to just grunt over it.

  Wilson always loved ‘Bob’s Your Uncle’ and it was actually one of the songs played at his funeral in 2007.

  There might have been a slight debate about including ‘Step On’ on the album, because it had already been a single, but if you have a Top 5 single before the album comes out, then you put it on the album, that’s standard, that’s what happens. And ‘Step On’ fitted with the vibe of the rest of the album, totally.

  ‘Holiday’ was one of the earlier tracks that we wrote in Manchester. Our Kid wanted to rip off the chorus from Madonna’s ‘Holiday’ – although we just ripped the ‘Holiday’ bit in the end, so it’s hardly even a rip – and then I turned it into a little short story. It’s just a little nod to what always used to happen to me before I became well known with the band – ‘Hold it there, boy, is that your bag?’ I could never fly into Manchester airport, or pretty much any airport, without being strip-searched. I was always being stuck on the glass toilet – ‘You don’t look first class you, let me look up your arse you’. Even if I went through Dover and got the ferry I would get strip-searched. I got pretty shitty treatment. The customs officers didn’t stop me because they thought I was carrying my own drugs just for personal use. The fuckers took one look at me and presumed I was trying to sneak in with a few ounces of coke shoved down my nuts, or wraps of heroin inside me, like some kind of mule. That’s them talking in the first verse – ‘a small sneak and you’ve just been had’. Thankfully, that all calmed down when we got known with the band. Once you’ve become a bit famous they presume that if you do have drugs on you it’s only going to be for personal use. And you certainly don’t need the mither of taking it over the border. But back in the day, I obviously looked a likely candidate to be a mule, plus I already had that bust on my record for importation. When the band took off, we wouldn’t really need to smuggle any personal drugs, because wherever we were going we’d have them waiting for us on the other side anyway. So the hassle we were getting at customs calmed down a bit.

  ‘Holiday’ then segues into ‘Harmony’, which is the last track on the album.

  The recording process of Pills ’n’ Thrills was quite different to Bummed, as Bummed had been to Squirrel. There was a lot more overdubbing with Pills, and a lot less recording live as a band. This time it was more a case of ‘Right, let’s get Paul in and get him to record his bass part for this’; it was mostly done separately. When we were finished I think we all knew it was a great album. From ‘Step
On’, we knew we were on a roll, and working with Oakey and Osborne had just gone so well.

  By then, after Squirrel and Bummed, it was kind of tradition that I came up with album titles. Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches just came off the top of my head. Just came to me like that; there was no thought about it. Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, straight off the top of my head. It was one of those ‘I’ll have that’ moments. I didn’t spend days thinking about it. I hate it when I have to spend ages thinking about something. I spent a year thinking of an album title for my last album and I hated that. The album was canned and ready to go, and I still didn’t have a title. Usually a title will come to me straight away, right there and then, but when it doesn’t it can take for ever.

  Our Paul got married to his girlfriend Alison when we were out in LA recording Pills ’n’ Thrills. The ceremony was at this real nice gaff, out in the open air, some hotel with beautiful lawns and marquees, a nice little set-up. Unfortunately, he was pretty much divorced not long after we came back.

  We had the launch party for Pills ’n’ Thrills at London Zoo. At the time they were renting out the zoo for parties and there had been a couple of raves there already, I think. I got one of my first insights into the depths the press could stoop to at that party. Like I said before, because we’d been on Top of the Pops, we were out of the hands of the likes of the NME and we were now the property of the red tops. Halfway through the launch party I came out of the aquarium and there were three geezers lifting up a park bench and trying to throw it into one of the big fish tanks. We just thought it was some knobheads who had gatecrashed our party, so we were like, ‘What the fuck are you doing, you pricks?’ and this big scuffle starts. Then it turns out they had press passes, and they were tabloid hacks. They wanted the story of ‘Ecstasy-takers Dump Bench in Fish Tank’, or the headline ‘Look What This Sick Group Did to London Zoo!’ So they were throwing the bench in there themselves to create the story. We threw them out instead.